Book excerpt: Introduction to Open Core Protocol

The Open Core Protocol (OCP) is designed to accelerate IP core-to-core interface design efforts and this book is designed to bring you up to speed faster...

I promised to deliver a preview of the new OCP-IP book written by David Schwaderer and here it is. I will be presenting three parts of the book from chapters 1 through 3. Thanks to Ian Mackintosh at OCP-IP and Charles Glaser at Springer for making this possible.

From the prefaceWelcome to the Open Core Protocol (OCP) world. OCP is a compact interface, designed to accelerate IP core-to-core interface design efforts. It has many features that are each individually simple. Collectively, they allow designers to create interfaces with arbitrary intricacy. With OCP, the only limit seems to be your imagination.

The OCP International Partnership (OCP-IP) oversees OCP’s standardization and evolution efforts. There are many international participants in OCP-IP, and OCP-IP membership is available at several participating levels. That said, OCP has achieved global popularity based on its simplicity and the fact that the specification is available at no charge for research purposes. You will want to visit OCP-IP’s Web site at www.ocpip.org for all the details.

From the back coverThis book introduces Open Core Protocol (OCP), not as a conventional hardware communications protocol but as a meta-protocol: a means for describing and capturing the communications requirements of an IP core, and mapping them to a specific set of signals with known semantics. Readers will learn the capabilities of OCP as a semiconductor hardware interface specification that allows different System-On-Chip (SoC) cores to communicate. The OCP methodology presented enables intellectual property designers to design core interfaces in standard ways. This facilitates reusing OCP-compliant cores across multiple SoC designs which, in turn, drastically reduces design times, support costs, and overall cost for electronics/SoCs. Provides a comprehensive introduction to Open Core Protocol, which is more accessible than the full specification; Designed as a hands-on, how-to guide to semiconductor design; Includes numerous, real “usage examples” which are not available in the full specification; Integrates coverage of design methodology discussing why cores are structured the way they are, whereas the official OCP specification only answers what the structure is.

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While I cannot speak of actual acceptance, OCP has existed for a lot longer than IP-XACT and the OCP international partnership has a large number of paying members. These are top tier companies and you can find a list of them on the OCP website. So, I believe it has widespread acceptance.